Missouri Botanical Garden to Break Ground on New, $92M Visitor Center
Date Posted: October 21, 2019
Posted In: Projects,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Architects have drawn the plans, and botanists have gathered the seeds of endangered plants and trees.
Now, to break ground.
The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis will start construction in January on a new, $92 million visitor center, garden officials announced Monday.
The complex will replace the current center and give guests a larger, more accessible and streamlined place to start and stay for their visit.
The Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center is scheduled to open in spring 2022.
The Taylor family donated “a lead gift” for the project, and the rest was privately funded, said Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson, president of the garden.
People have been generous with donations, and nobody questioned the need for a new center, Wyse Jackson said.
“No one has said, ‘Oh, I think the current one is fine,’” he said with a chuckle.
The current Ridgway Visitor Center was built in 1982, meant to accommodate 250,000 visitors a year. Now, the garden welcomes nearly 1 million visitors annually, and getting them through the doors and into the garden sometimes can be a confusing squeeze.
“People would come in and not know where the garden was,” he said. In the new center, “it will be much more obvious that the garden opens up to you.”
The current center, at 4344 Shaw Boulevard, has two levels, with one small elevator that parents with strollers or people using wheelchairs often wait to use. The gift shop and a floral display hall are tucked in back corners. The upstairs hall can be used for weddings and other events, but at limited times, since people visiting the garden have to pass through to exit.
The Ridgway Center, designed by Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, is 67,000 feet and has a glass and steel structure designed to look like London’s Crystal Palace. The new center will be 90,000 feet and will be built in the footprint of the old center, with extensions into the eastern parking lot and into the plaza area of the current garden.
A few parking spaces on the eastern lot will be lost in the first phase of the building, an event space that can accommodate 330 people seated at tables and 450 for conferences, such as a botanical congress. The space will have a separate exit and entry to the garden.